Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula

“A lucid and compelling account of the slave experience in a region long ignored by historians of slavery…. [It is] a valuable case study that underscores the need for historians to pay closer attention to the ways in which environmental factors shaped the slave experience in various parts of the world.”

Richard B. Allen, author of European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850

“Reilly’s valuable book is a rare environmental and medical history of the Arabian Peninsula, which fills a gap in the literature. This study will benefit not only specialists in environmental history but also students and researchers of the history of medicine and technology.”

Canadian Journal of History

In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil.

This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East—an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.

Benjamin Reilly is an associate teaching professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus. He is the author of Disaster and Human History: Case Studies in Nature, Society and Catastrophe and Tropical Surge: A History of Ambition and Disaster on the Florida Shore.

Featured

“The goal of this book is to describe, in as much detail as the sources permit, a system of slave and servile agricultural labor, employing mainly sub-Saharan africans, which prevailed in the traditional arabian Penin- sola.…”